insto - Australian financial markets

By replacing face-to-face meetings in the US and UK with "immersive telepresence" conferences, global actuarial and consulting firm Milliman's Sydney office expects to save $250,000 in flight and travel costs over the next 12 months.

Milliman, with over 2,100 employees worldwide, established the Sydney office in early 2007 to service a blue-chip client base that includes insurance providers, superannuation funds, investment companies and wealth management businesses.

One senior executive at an algo systems provider lets fly against the use of broker research to garner undue influence over fund managers’ major trading decisions.

John Fildes, managing director for Instinet in Hong Kong and Australia, is less than happy with what he sees as a cosy deal between investment fund managers and brokerage houses. He’s firing the first salvo in what may be a bitter war to break what he regards as an oligopoly, where the largest trades are run amongst the big banks and institutional investors, with no real oversight as to performance.

In what is a first for the Australian life insurance and wealth management industry, Aviva will utilise the voice biometrics to transform the way it interacts with its customers and advisors. Simply by using the unique characteristics of the member’s voice, the identity of callers to Aviva can be quickly verified and the call routed to the most appropriate resource. The firms involve contend that this will raise the level of customer service and convenience, while providing an added layer of security and privacy to telephone enquiries and transactions.

Crossing systems are starting to become more widespread, as funds managers scramble for cost saving and efficiency gains. Bernard Kellerman spoke to one of the players.

It’s technological warfare out there folks – just that it’s unclear who the combatants are, and who the winners are likely to be.

Until now, the impact of spam - those unwanted, unsolicited nuisance e-mails - has been measured in time, money, and aggravation. It turns out there is a massive environmental impact as well.

It must have seemed a smart idea when Google paid US$1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006. But more than two years later, Google is losing as much as $1.65 million a day on the web's most popular video site, according to calculations and analysis from Internet Evolution's editor-in-chief Terry Sweeney.

The increasing amount of overlap and duplication of data, tasks and processes in their anti-fraud and anti-money laundering divisions is driving banks to seek synergies between compliance, risk management and security, reveals a new report by independent market analysis firm Datamonitor.

The delay in opening Australia's trading systems market to a global technology revolution is robbing traders and investors of world's best practice developments. Maggie Macrae reports.

The Royal Bank of Scotland's chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, called for an end to public flogging of banks for past mistakes.